Welcome to Baen's Bar! The first screen you will see is the login screen. If you haven't registered and setup a user ID and password, you need to do that first. Users who had accounts on the old Bar will need to register again. Use the "Register Now" link.
If you have previously registered and forgotten your password you can use the "Forgot your password form at the bottom of the login screen to get a temporary password.
To register click the "Register Now" link. This will give you the Registration screen.
First, select a User Name. User Names have a maximum of 30 characters, using only A-Z, a-z 0-9 {} [] ^\-_ Do not use spaces. The first character may not be a number or a hyphen. Each User Name is unique; if someone is already using the User Name you enter, the form will ask you to select a different one. User names are case sensitive so "Joe" and "joe" are not the same name.
Select a password and enter it in both password fields. Passwords are case sensitive so be sure you rmember how you register your password.
Then select an email address. This must be a valid address where you actually receive email because the system will be sending you a confirmation email to which you must respond in order to verify your registration. Make sure that you open your spam filters to bar.baen.com so that the verification email won't get lost.
Then type in the letters you see in the graphic. This is a CAPTCHA test (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) that helps prevent spambots from creating accounts. If you can't see the letters you can click the Listen to the Characters link and it will read the characters for you if your computer is audio capable.
Click the create User button and your account will be created. The next screen is the confirmation screen.
Check your email inbox and follow the instructions in the verification email in order to confirm your account. Click the "Continue" button and you will be returned to the login screen.
Now you should be able to login using the new User Name and Password. A normal login will timeout after about 30 minutes of non-activity, so if you are composing a long answer you may lose it if it takes too long. If you want the system to remember your login between sessions click the "Remember me next time" checkbox. This will also prevent the timeout from inactivity. "Remember me" leaves a cookie on your machine so if you are logged in on a public machine make sure you click the "Logout" link to remove the cookie before you leave the machine or someone may be able to use your account.
If you forget your password, you can use the "Forgot Your Password?" box on the login screen to get a temporary password. The system will send your temporary password to the email address associated with your User Name. Once you get the temporary password, use it to login and go to your Profile to change the password to something more memorable.
Once you properly login you can see the main screen.
Now that you can login you need to fill out your Profile. This is some extra information about you that determines how your messages will be labeled. It also is where you can change your Password and manage mailing list subscriptions and email alerts.
On the top toolbar click the "Profile" link.
First fill out your profile.
Make sure click the Save button at the bottom to save your information.
The other function available on the Profile page are:
The Newsgroups list displays the list of groups that are available. Groups with bold titles have received new messages since the last time you marked that group as Read. At the top left is the total number of new messages in all groups. The set of three numbers at the right of each group name is the number of:
Threads : Total messages : New Message
To select a group for viewing click on the title. Use the scrollbar to view the entire list.
As you look at the list of messages in each group the system remembers the last message in that group. The "Mark All Read" link sets all of the groups as read to that last message as of the time you clicked on the group title. This is important because while you are reading messages new messages may arrive that will not be displayed in the list of messages. When you click Mark Read those messages will be after the last message at the time you clicked the group. The messages that arrived during the time you were reading will be displayed and you will not miss any messages.
The Message tree presents a tree of the message subjects, the sender's name and the date and time that the message was sent. The default will show the New Messages in one of two views, as shown below. If you want to see all messages in a group, check the "ALL" checkbox. Note that some conferences have a LOT of messages and it may take some time to retrieve all of the titles.
New Messages are displayed in bold. To read a message click on the title. You can also use the keyboard to move between titles and use the space bar to display them.
There are two ways the list may be viewed. In the Tree View the message titles that are in the same thread as the New messages will be displayed in their relationship to any New messages. This allows you to look at previous messages in the thread for reference. Click on the "Tree" radio button to select this view.
TREE VIEW
The red "New" label indicates that this thread contains new messages since last marked. Expand the thread by clicking on the "+" sign to display the full thread. The new messages will be in bold type. You can see the relationship of the new messages to the previous messages.
LIST VIEW
In the List view only the New messages are displayed in a simple list. This lets you quickly get to new messages without working through the tree of surrounding messages. Click on the "List" radio button to select this view.
The "Mark Read" link here marks only the messages in this newsgroup as read as of the time you first displayed the list.. It does not mark other groups as the "Mark All Read" link would. Typically a user will select a group, read through the new messages and continue through the list of groups, clicking Mark All Read when they want to stop. This prevents them from missing any messages even if they stop part way through the list of groups. The "Mark Read" link can be used to clear a particular group before going to another group.
There are four other functions controlled from this list. In this section there are links to subscribe to the mailing list if you wish to have the messages sent to you via email. Click on the green "Mail" icon to subscribe. You can receive messages as individual emails or as a digest of all messages daily in one email.
You can ask for email Alerts whenever a message is added to a group by clicking the red "Alerts" icon.
You can switch to an NNTP Newsreader client by clicking the green NNTP icon. This will let you subscribe the NNTP feed for this group and you can use your favorite Newsreader to read the messages. See section 7 for more details.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the messages by clicking on the orange RSS icon. Note that since the site requires login some RSS clients may not be able to handle a secure RSS feed. See section 8 for more details.
At the bottom of the list are two more controls.
The Bookmark control adds this particular group to your list of Favorites/Bookmarks in your browser. Just click it and follow the dialog for adding the bookmark. This will not appear on Safari.
If the list of messages is large they will be presented in pages of 20 threads per page. Use the Blue arrows to move forward and backward through the pages. Or enter a page number and click the green go button to go to a particular page. Page numbers for a given post will change as new messages arrive so don't depend on page numbers to find a particular post. Search will work better for this.
The board supports mailing lists. You can subscribe to each group as described in section 4 above. When you subscribe to a mailing list a preliminary email is sent to verify your email address. When you receive this message, follow the instructions and respond to it to start receiving email from the group. You can reply to email messages just like you would any other email by clicking reply and typing your reply message. The reply will appear in the group shortly.
You can select to receive each posting as an individual email or you can get a day's worth of message in one digest email.
To resign from a mailing list you can use the links in your Profile on the Web interface or you can you use the "remove" command given in the initial email for the group.
You can set the system to send you a simple email alert when a new message is posted to a group. This is a simple "There is a new message in [Group] with a link to the message.
Alerts may also be added to individual threads in a group. So if you only want to receive Alerts about the thread " Ammunition supplies in 2007" you would use the Alert link appearing on the actual message in the reader panel.
You can remove alerts by using the links in the "Profile" section.
You can use a standard NNTP Newsreader like Thunderbird, Outlook Express and many others. You do need to sign up through the Web Interface first to establish a User ID and password and you will need to tell your NNTP client to use this ID and Password when connecting to the Bar.
The server address is
In the properties for this server tell your NNTP client that this server requires login and give it your ID and password as you registered them..
You can subscribe to RSS feeds of messages in each group as described in section 4. Note that not all RSS clients can handle secure RSS feeds and may give error messages that it can't open the feed.
The reading pane displays the actual messages. You display a message by clicking the message title in the Message Tree. Not all of the icons shown will appear to all users. Some of them are for moderator functions. The "Delete" icon only shows for moderators and for the owner of the message. If the Delete icon appears you can delete the message.
The "Reply" icon is used to reply to a message. It will bring up a blank posting screen to enter your reply message in.
The "Quote" icon lets you reply and brings up a posting screen with the message being replied to already pasted into the new message with an attribution to the writer of the message being replied to.
The "Alerts" icon lets you start receiving email alerts if new messages are added to the thread this particular message belongs to. This is different than the Alerts icon in the Message Tree. The Message tree Alerts are for any message added to any thread in the entire group.
The reading pane will display the message selected and any replies to that message below it. So by scrolling down you can follow the entire thread following the selected message. Each has its own header and icons so they can also be replied to.
You can post new messages to a group either by using the Reply/Quote icons as explained in section 9 or by starting a new thread by first selecting a group and then clicking the "New Post" link at the top of the screen. Either method will bring up a Posting screen. If you are Quoting, the message being quoted will already be inserted into the message.
For a New message be sure to enter a Subject line for the message.
For most browsers the screen is a full blown HTML editor with many features. On Safari and Opera the screen is a much simpler textbox with no formatting features and quoting is not automatic.
For the full editor there are standard editing controls like bold, italic, underline, fonts, etc. A few may need special explanation. The Check Word icon, for example, will clean up the HTML generated by a cut and paste from Word removing Microsoft's messy style formatting. The ab+ icon will give a word count.
When adding a message we prefer top posting. Yes, this is contrary to Usenet style, but if you expect the message to get read by one of the editors you better top post because they will not spend the time to scroll through a bunch of quotes for every message.
If you need to type something in the quote section such as an interspersed comment, double click in the quote box to get it to recognize you want to change text there.
You can Attach files by using the paperclip icon. This will give you a screen to search for and add files from your machine that will be attached to the message.
Use the Browse button to find the file on your machine and then click Upload to send the file to the editor. You can add more than one file, each of which will appear in the Files list. Once the list is complete click the Close button.
For other icons you can place the cursor over them and a tooltip will appear describing its purpose.
When your message is complete, click the Post Message button to send the message.
Query syntax
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Query
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Example
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Notes
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single term
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document
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Searches for messages that contain "document" term in any field
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Phrase
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"important document"
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Searches for messages that contain the phrase "important document" in any field
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searching fields
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subject:document
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Searches for messages that contain "document" term in the subject field
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wildcard search
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doc?ment
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Single character wildcard search. It will match "document" and "dociment", but not "docooment"
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document*
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Multi-character wildcard search. It will match "document" and "documentation"
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fuzzy search
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document~
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Search based on similar spelling
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document~0.9
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Search based on similar spelling, with 0.9 similarity (0.5 is the default)
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proximity search
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"important document"~5
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Finds words of a phrase that are not next to each other. Maximum distance in this example is 5 words
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range search
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date:{20050501 TO 20050531}
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Searches for messages posted between 1st May 2005 and 31st May 2005 (exclusive)
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date:[20050501 TO 20050531]
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Searches for messages posted between 1st May 2005 and 31st May 2005 (inclusive)
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relevance
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important^4 document
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Set boost factor of the term "important" to 4. Default boost factor is 1
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"important document"^4 "search engine"
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You can set boost factor for phrases too
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OR operator
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important document
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"OR" is the default operator
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important OR document
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The message must contain either "important" or "document"
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AND operator
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important AND document
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The message must contain both words
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+ operator
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important +document
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The message must contain "document" and may contain "important"
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NOT/- operator
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-important document
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The message must contain "document" but not "important"
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grouping
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(important OR office) AND document
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Use parentheses for expression grouping
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from:(Einstein OR Newton)
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Parentheses work with fields as well
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Prohibited queries
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Query
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Example
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Notes
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wildcards at the beginning of a term
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?ocument, *ocument
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common words
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a, the, and
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Common words are not indexed
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special characters: + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \
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\+, \:
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Use a backslash to escape the special characters
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You can, of course, combine search criteria such as give me all postings by "Toni" for "Today".
The new software is based on a standard NNTP news server, unlike the old bar which started out as a Webboard based interface that had NNTP and email features "stuck on". It is optimized for multi threading on NNTP and supports proper cross referencing and XOVER functions which were missing from the old WebBoard. This gives a much more stable base system.
The mailing list functions are built on top of the NNTP database. Functionality is much the same but the mailing list can support full HTML messages instead of simple text messages. Attachments are handled better so that email users don't lose attachments as often happened in WebBoard.
The Web interface was designed to carry over the best features of the WebBoard interfaces. There is a full thread tree view of the messages available that shows the relationships between messages. There is a simple flat message order list view. You can select only new listings or "All" listings.
The reading pane for a given message includes the messages that follow in the same thread below the starting message. Just scroll down and you can read the thread in order. The "Print" function will printout the reader pane
You can mark read the individual newsgroups. They are marked based on the database index instead of the datetime as was used in WebBoard. Since messages are not guaranteed to arrive in datetime order the index gives a better control of the order of marking. You may find that when you mark a newsgroup as read that it will still show some messages in the list. This is normal. It simple means that more messages arrived during the time you were reading the previous list of messages.
You can get a user profile, assuming they have entered one, of other users by clicking on their icon in a message. This will show their real name, their public email address, their home page, when they originally registered, the number of messages posted and any comments they may want to share with others.
Extra security has been added. You can change your own email address now but it will revalidate the new email address by sending a message to that address which must be responded to before the change is made. This prevents people from changing their email to impersonate other users.
There are a number of features that did not carry over to the new software.